Loves Lost

“Reign Over Me” and “Premonition.”

Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is thus with a degree of amazement that I find myself nominating “Reign Over Me,” written and directed by Mike Binder, as a movie that might be worth your time.

Sandler stars as Charlie Fineman, whose existence is a wild rebuke to his name. Charlie is far from fine. He is a human heap, whining through New York on a small electric scooter, his hearing cut off by a pair of headphones the size of avocados. You might almost think he wanted to be flattened by a truck. He has sheepdog hair, graying to the color of old newsprint. For kicks, he likes to sit in his apartment and play a video game, “Shadow of the Colossus,” on a huge screen. Over time, we discover the colossus in whose shadow Charlie lurks and mumbles to himself. He lost a wife and three daughters on September 11, 2001, and then he lost the capacity to admit that he had a wife and three daughters in the first place. Without the will to remember, the movie suggests, there can be no will to live.

That is an unusually gloomy proposition not just for a studio movie but for a society that, despite the acts and sites of official commemoration, must find good cause to forge ahead from catastrophe. “Reign Over Me” closes with, at best, a cautious hope, leaving us more anxious than when we went in, and throughout the film there is a stunned and bewildered air hanging over the city, like a heavy smog. The action takes place in the present day, years after the collapse of the Twin Towers, yet when Charlie’s friend Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), a dentist, runs into Angela Oakhurst (Liv Tyler), a psychiatrist who works in his building, and tries to tell her about Charlie’s family, all he can say is that “they were killed in a plane crash.” How far can denial spread?

It isn’t only the Charlies of New York, in other words, who are stuck for words, or trapped in immovable feelings. It’s the Alans, too—a curious fact, since Alan is successful, and married to the immaculate Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith), with daughters of his own. Long ago, he was Charlie’s college roommate; now he bumps into him again, and makes an effort to resuscitate him. To the movie’s credit, the scheme is hardly a triumph. The moment you think that Charlie is back in the swim, he starts to thrash and splutter—laying waste to Alan’s office, or foaming with anger in a coffee shop. Though Alan hooks him up with Angela, all that Charlie can do is congratulate the doctor on her breasts and, when she starts to ask about bereavement, scroll up the volume on his iPod. And yet something does seep through, as if to show that fate is not unchangeably malign: a channel-flipping Charlie stumbles on “You Were Never Lovelier,” with Rita Hayworth smiling at Fred Astaire, and nearly smiles himself. Better still, he persuades Alan to hitch a ride on the back of his scooter, which leaves us with the cheery spectacle of two grown men, standing bolt upright like shop dummies, zipping along to the strains of the Pretenders. “Stop all your sobbing,” Chrissie Hynde tells us, with that imploring crack in her voice, but the movie treads haltingly, as if to reply, Not yet.

All the relationships in “Reign Over Me” are either busted or badly in need of repair. There is Alan’s marriage, which is seizing up; there is his professional flirtation with Angela (he wants therapy but daren’t ask for it); and there is the other sort of flirting, not so much professional as pornographic, which is launched in his direction by Donna Remar (Saffron Burrows), a dental patient of surpassing beauty and unsound mind. I didn’t quite believe in her pursuit of Alan, and it soon becomes clear that the main weakness of Binder’s movie is its approach to women, which veers between the idolatrous and the petrified. By the end, Charlie’s plight has won the sympathy not just of Angela but of Donna, at which point my thoughts drifted into the heretical: tragedy is tragedy, but, if Liv Tyler and Saffron Burrows are tending to your needs, might life not be getting a little brighter?

These implausibilities may jolt the movie, but they don’t derail it, because they run in line with Binder’s vision of a fractious, off-kilter world. Back in 1990, Binder wrote a fine and underrated film called “Coupe de Ville,” about three bickering brothers; it was, incidentally, almost womanless, but it proved that he had an ear for the snap and swerve of argument—still well tuned in “Reign Over Me,” and matched by the eye of Russ Alsobrook, his director of photography. Alsobrook works in high-definition digital to rid the city of serenity: everything is haste and jumble, with pleasure being grabbed and lost on the run, and the long, nocturnal streets promising more desolation than romance. Even Don Cheadle, classy and controlled as he is, gets thrown back onto his nerves, and his striving to keep himself together, though far less anguished than Charlie’s, is somehow the meat of the film. Which leaves us with Adam Sandler. I cannot remember laughing at a single scene of his comedies, but here, for once, his chosen persona—the slurring and disconnected goofball—makes sense, although I still think of him as an oddly hollow presence on which to build a movie. His grief is less convincing than his vacancy, and one effect of “Reign Over Me” is to make you ask, Who will improve on Sandler? Who can do for New York, in the wake of 9/11, what the young Scorsese, De Niro, and Keitel did for the city in earlier years, and under less threatening skies?

The new Sandra Bullock film, “Premonition,” is about a wife and mother who foresees that her husband is about to die. Then he dies. Why is it, in movies, that people with clairvoyant powers see only the dire and dangerous things that will befall them? If you can predict a death, why not the winner of the Belmont Stakes, so that you can amble down to the bookies before the beginning of June? No such luck for Bullock’s character, Linda Hanson, who looks fairly stressed even before the premonitions kick in. She is married to Jim (Julian McMahon), she has two adoring daughters, but does she look happy? No, she looks like someone posing for Edvard Munch.

This is bizarre, given that Bullock is one of the few leading ladies—Meg Ryan having temporarily vanished into the mists—who know how to carry a comedy, and to make that difficult burden seem as light as a kite. She has always been a frowner and a fretter, but in movies past, beginning with “Speed,” those worry lines could be erased with ease; they were part of her quick-response skills, and of her determination to ride the bumps of mischance. The first sin committed by Mennan Yapo, the director of “Premonition,” is that he manages to make his heroine’s face look at once drawn and swollen, as if the sight of a pretty woman might, like a dirty joke, inflict frivolous damage on the drama. Tell that to Carole Lombard. Or Myrna Loy.

The chronology is all chewed up, with Linda waking the day after the funeral to learn that Jim is still alive, then waking again to find the opposite, and so on. It might have been simpler to call the movie “Groundhog Death.” Slowly, a plot emerges. Just as the two daughters are seen, early on, carefully putting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle—well, now their mom has to solve a puzzle of her own. (“Reign Over Me” pulls an almost identical trick. I live for these delicate hints.) Linda discovers, thanks to her Sibylline gift, that Jim is about to sneak off with a colleague named Claire (Amber Valletta), and that it is en route to the tryst that he will crash and burn. According to Linda, “Maybe it was supposed to happen. Even though he didn’t do anything yet, maybe it was enough that he was going to.” This was a new one to me: “Minority Report” for the lustful. In short, the moral of “Premonition” is that you can expect to be killed for wanting to sleep with Amber Valletta. According to my calculations, this means that ten million Americans will die by tomorrow morning, half of them in the shower.

Call it dark, call it spooky, but somehow I knew that “Premonition” would be a stinker. Was it a dream, or did I really foresee that Kate Nelligan would be wasted in the role of Linda’s mother? Or that the name of Peter Stormare in the opening credits meant that at least one of the characters would be a menacing fruitcake? Scoff if you will, but such coincidences cannot be swept aside. Listen to Linda’s minister, who happens to have a book of famous premonitions at hand when she drops by, its weirder passages marked with yellow stickies. People who have lost their faith, he says, are “empty vessels,” waiting to be filled with ungodly, prophetic talents such as hers. So there you have it: go to church, keep your husband’s gaze averted from stray blondes, try not to think about the future, and all shall be well. Although “Premonition” is not a frightening movie, it is aimed squarely at an audience of frightened souls. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”